Balance

[pianolarva]

1:
Bloodlust:
I think it's OP as everyone says. Is there no solution? Are orcs just better in mid-game until mages get to play? Does any pro use humans?

2:
Archers:
I find them almost useless even with upgrades.

3:
Rebalanced mode:
I'm guessing the community isn't interested in balancing the game, in making every unit, spell and upgrade useful.

[Mistral]

yes lust op but some super ultra pro players (like u8) play hoomans and win vs orcs using some non mainstream strats

yes archers is pitifully weak but they have some good uses like not alowing peon repair choke point building with shooting from behind or protect base

[pianolarva]

I'd like to see that.

Yes, archers work on some ocassions

[dannyldd]

bloodlust breaks the game. Any other spell is just weaker in comparison. Humans straight up cannot fight bloodlust. Another orc has no other thing that other bloodlust spam to fight against it.

About 2 and 3, there's an actual solution.

I'm a little war2 modder and I have talked to some community members but I tend to find that people are way too conservative to ever make a change for the better in game.

Archers/Rangers/Trolls/Berserkers are not necessarily bad, but bloodlust/death&decay/Blizzard are way too strong. The natural counter to these units may be fireball/death coils or Flame shield. But again, the first 3 mentioned spells are way too overpowered.

in 3) I have a little re-balance game within one of my most recent war2 public free mods, called as Road of Heroes
All my mods in: https://gamebanana.com/members/submissions/mods/1738346
Road of Heroes in: https://gamebanana.com/mods/433454

Basically, here I have managed to apply some re-balance changes to units like Rangers which get an attack speed boost with Rangers upgrade, same as berserkers but not as fast as Rangers.  Healing is also 4mana/1HP instead of 6mana/1HP to be more balanced against bloodlust and actually reward your APM for healing or Rangers micro usage. Archers + trolls also have a little boost to their base game attack speed.

Other stuff have been added up already like boosted skeletons on their skills, which makes Exorcism automatically more useful.
Gryphon Raiders + Dragons have faster attack speed.

Other planned stuff is to allow ground attack damage to apply into Gryphons or ground armor upgrades to Dragons. But also reducing range of D&D/Blizzard nor mana cost.

Still, if you're interested on more of this, you can check out my mod. Almost all the mods though are intended for Single player campaigns or custom maps.

I have came to play on other real time strategy games and overall, people are way too stubborn / conservative to ever apply a re-balance game patch for the better in any game... And I dont mean about waiting of like 2 months from testings to add like +2 damage to Grunts but actual re-balance patches that can attempt to change several other features of game to deliver whole new set of strategies.

Either way, if it's about to re-balance changes, I think the best method is this one used in League of legends where developers tend to release a new re-balance patch each 2-3 weeks to several of their in-game champions. This translated to War2, would be like applying a patch one time a month that may change about 5% of the game balance.

Fair enough to mention that, even if it's not likeable to be applied on main servers, there may still be worth to have a secondary server to allow testing up those new incoming re-balance patches... But again, this is up to community which overall seems way too conservative about it.

Hopefully this helps you out.

[pianolarva]

What are the things you can modify? I may spend time on a balanced mode.

I'm looking at changing walls and making every spell/unit useful to start with.

[dannyldd]

What are the things you can modify? I may spend time on a balanced mode.

I'm looking at changing walls and making every spell/unit useful to start with.

on this mod, Road of heroes i've tweaked some stuff already:
https://gamebanana.com/mods/433454

Archers + trolls have a bit higher attack speed than base game, since these units level 1-3 do little to nothing.

Rangers + berserkers get attack speed boost once they get their upgrade. Ranger > berserker attack speeds. Rangers are now a bit more of a counter to bloodlusted ogres.

Healing from 6mana/1hp to 4mana/1hp. It really feels more fair now compared to how much damage bloodlust can deal.

I can change the mana cost for all spells now. I dont know if its possible to change the range for casting each one of the spells, though.

I was planning to increase Death & decay + Blizzard mana cost from 25 to something like 75 or 80, so it stops to allow spamming that spell non stop. And so then instantly the other area of effect spells like whirlwinds, fireballs, death coils & flame shields become stronger.

[pianolarva]

Alright, I'm going to balance this game. What I'll do is upload a modified GOWClassic pud so that anyone interested can download it and play it with the "use map settings" option on the War2Mod channel.




Main changes:

- Walling will be done with actual walls. Walls will have reduced building time, higher cost. I may not be able to achieve this, so I think buildings will have lower hp instead.
- Modifications to make every unit/spell/upgrade useful (biggest changes are about rangers, bloodlust, healing, blizzard, and skeletons. The rest are smaller adjustments)


Detailed info (I will be updating this):

UNITS and BUILDINGS:
Buildings (except walls and towers) will have around 40% their hp.

• Archers (+): +1 piercing dmg for now. 
• Knights (-): NEW addition: Knights start with 80hp so that it's more even with rangers and footmen and Paladin Training adds +10hp. Next update will have knights cost 100 gold more in an attempt to balance footmen, and BL.
• Demo Squad: it now would destroy a shipyard or so
• Gryphons/Dragons (+): reduced building time from 250 to 200?. dmg increased from 16 to 20?.
• Walls (+): x4 reduced building time, it's fast but not immediate. Increased building cost. 100gold 50wood? Maybe more. Note that walls aren't repairable, but improvements to archers and towers will make up for that.
• Towers: Next update: hp x1.3. They were too weak and I don't think x1.3hp will be enough
• .
• .

UPGRADES and SPELLS:

• Footman upgrades: same?
• Arrow upgrades: same?
• Ballista upgrades (+): Gold 800 and 2000 for the second upgrade. It should be deadlier.
• Ranger training: same. On next update rangers should get around +3dmg, because ranger upgrades are very weak.
• Ranger scouting (+): 500 gold (1500)
• +1Range upgrade (+): Price decreased to 1500. Next update: at 500, there are some ways to outrange opponents that may work.
• Troll Regeneration (+): 10 cents. Next update: at 500.
• +3dmg for rangers (-): 6000 gold. Idk how to balance this one. So it will come into play very into late game.
• Healing (+): From using full mana to heal 42.5hp, to healing 127hp (2mana x 1hp. Less would be constant healing, more would mean it's weak compared to other spells like BL). Cost 1500. It's a powerful spell now, so it costs more (it's even with runes). 
• Exorcism (+): now you can kill dk with 120mana instead of 240. Damaging a dk doesn't matter much unless you kill him, which now doesn't require full mana. With the skeleton modifications, it now kills one skeleton with 100mana.
• Bloodlust (-): fixed at x2 so that it doesn't snowball from upgrades and becomes OP. Increased mana cost. 200. Around 2500 gold now. Increased building time to 200
• Runes (+): 150mana, 1500 cost. Mana cost should not be cheap because it would be used all over the battlefield, but not too high for it to be a better option than BL. Still BL is more powerful, and it will cost more gold.
• Fireball: (+): mana cost 50. increased dmg up to 40? Next update: 50mana. I think it does a bit more dmg than coil overall, and it could be useful at chokes maybe, but I'll leave it for now.
• Death Coil (+): will have the same mana cost as fireball. Next update: 50mana. I think it did little damage for its cost, like -45hp to a knight for 100 mana. Now you would kill around 2.5 basic knights at full mana, which still isn't that much.
• Slow (-): mana 100. Gold 1500?
• Polymorph (+): mana 150. Gold 1000?
• Inviz (+): mana 150. Gold 500? 
• Flame Shield: same? (mana 80, gold 1000)
• Blizzard/Decay (-): Gold 5000? (2000) It will make more dmg to buildings since they are weaker now. Next update: cost 3000, mana 150 (25), doing much less damage to buildings and peons. You used it so much on the gold mine, that now it's basically used only for that. It will only kill some peons. You'll need two mages, and better timing. The correct fix would be decreasing the ridiculous range, but that's not an option.
• Haste (-): 500 gold? (mana 50). Only because it gives 2x to dragons.
• Raise dead (+): Gold 1000 (mana 50). Skeletons have around 50hp, 16dmg, 8pierDmg, 0armor (knights are 90,8,4,4). Skeletons should still have weak hp for exorcism to be useful. On next update skels will be 50,12,8,0.
• Unholy Armor (+): 150 mana, 500 Gold ?
• Whirlwind: (1500 gold, 100 mana) It now has a bigger impact on buildings instead of just going aimlessly and damaging many buildings but not destroying much. 

Waiting for mana to reach 200 was a bit much. I still mantain both sides having mana/cost cheap spells.
I'd need to see some games for further balance. Especially about how walls, towers and archers play out.

You can download the map now. It's Great White North.

[Mistral]

unit walls hp do NOT affect tileset walls hp AT ALL
tileset walls always have 40 hp
and unit walls always will be changed into tilesets after completion, you cannot change it
so unit wall hp only in effect while wall is in build progres, which is very fast and if you say you make it even faster then walls hp itself is not affect almost anything

on the other hand tileset walls have very big resist, they are hardcoded to receive only 25% damage from any source even from mages and spells who have only piercing attack they still get 1/4 of dmg
BUT they always will get AT LEAST 1 hp, there is even some fun bug exists, if you set some unit stats for 0-0 attack, so he basically cannot do any damage to anything at all, this units will STILL be able to break walls very slowly though, with 1 hp per hit

[pianolarva]

thanks for the info, and for killing the project.

[pianolarva]

There may be a way to edit game files and change this but I don't know how to. So that leads me to the final option:

Decrease hp, armor, damage values of everything until they are something like 35% of what they are now. Numbers would be somewhat similar. Cons: upgrades would be more powerful so they would cost more. Pros: spells would get interesting. Whirlwind would really do damage, flame shield too, and do you know what spell would actually be very good? HEALING. 150 mana would cure more than half a paladin.

[Mistral]

maybe you insead try to use triggers editor?
there is way more stuff you can do with it
like changing upgrades power and spells costs
you can make map that can be played in triggers game mode

check this link for triggers editor prog: https://forum.war2.ru/index.php?topic=6242.0

[pianolarva]

I'll take a look, didn't know about it. How is it not pinned on the forums? It looks great.

[pianolarva]

I'm voting for you for the hall of fame, this is too good. What's everyone doing not using this mode? I especially like that you can have demons, the ogre mode, and autoheal, and I think I also saw a random map generator!

There's one important thing I need to modify. The ranger upgrade. It sets the hp to 50. I tried adding a trigger but it didn't help.

Btw I'll edit unit stats on the editor because I couldn't find how to.

[dannyldd]

I'm voting for you for the hall of fame, this is too good. What's everyone doing not using this mode? I especially like that you can have demons, the ogre mode, and autoheal.

There's one important thing I need to modify. The ranger upgrade. It sets the hp to 50. I tried adding a trigger but it didn't help.

Btw I'll edit unit stats on the editor because I couldn't find how to.

I haven't used triggers tool but I use Code instead. Plugins. Both creations by Mistral.

I have made a couple of mods already which use Code, aka: custom objectives, custom spells and way more stuff.

Here are all my mods:
https://gamebanana.com/members/submissions/mods/1738346?

The mods "Road of Heroes" + Legacy of Dalaran Enhanced are the current ones where I apply mana cost changes, faster attack speed for archer/troll/berserker/rangers, repairable catapults, way smarter AI, higher difficulty and way more.


This triggers tool exists since like early 2021 but haven't heard of anybody else who may have released an official campaign or custom maps with custom modding features, thanks to this program OR with code-plugins.

[pianolarva]

Dannyldd:
You mentioned all about your mod, but you never mentioned triggers! I'm surprised there's so much you can change.